We've all become used to the idea of the price of an airline seat varying according to the season, day of the week and time of day. This is dynamic pricing in action. The “new kid on the block” however is the setting of the price of an airline ticket according to the attributes of the customer i.e. personalised pricing.

Almost half of the 65 million trips taken abroad each year by UK citizens are "package holidays" - where the consumer buys a complete package of accommodation, flight and connections for a single price. It’s a highly competitive market with a small number of large tour operators wrestling hard for market share.

If you are not constantly reviewing and updating your prices you could be missing out.

Technology now allows businesses to change prices frequently, minute-by-minute if required. Amazon and Expedia update their prices several times a day and consumers are becoming increasingly accustomed to this state of affairs everywhere they shop – so, if it works for these "big players", what's stopping you from making frequent price changes?

Pricing doesn't always need to be logical but it does need to work because it has a huge impact on a business's bottom line. Raising or lowering prices can be the quickest way to either sell more products or to earn more for each item sold. Either way, it's all good news for a business owner.

Our shopping culture has certainly changed in the last decade and practically everyone in retail seems to be slashing their prices constantly. Discounts are all around us, and, as consumers, we’ve started to be conditioned to not make a purchase unless we’re getting a great deal.

According to Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric (GE) “if you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete”. In a nutshell, he meant don't bother getting into the fray if you don't intend to win!

The job of getting our pricing right never seems to get any easier. Just how do you figure out what
Mr
X and
Ms
Y will pay for your products? And, even if you think you've got the price right, how can you improve take-up?

Perhaps now is the time to start experimenting in small ways to find a strategy which has the most beneficial effect on your conversion rate.

When you first launched your business you were probably nervous about price setting and didn't want to scare potential customers away by pricing too highly. It was probably easier (and you felt safer) to price low – your thinking being that this would attract new customers and steal customers away from competitors.

Well, this may have seemed like a good strategy in the early days but over time, have you made only nominal increases to your prices without considering what this is doing to your bottom line?